diablo 3 Archives - Page 13 of 14 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Ninja Grouping

March 6, 2014 by Belghast

Content Void

This morning I am completely struggling to find purpose in writing. I suppose I could try and counter point Scree’s post about my post yesterday. But honestly I don’t really feel the need, as he didn’t really shoot down any of the points I had made, but instead provided his own points for why he won’t be playing ESO and moreover why he feels like it never should have been made. They are some pretty drastic points, but they are his points and he has every right to his own opinion. Additionally each and every one of you have the undeniable right not to buy Elder Scrolls Online and not to love it. But again yesterdays post was spawned out of what I felt were some factual inaccuracies about a few points. However after reading his post this morning it also feels a lot like “I really hate this game, and here is why you should too.”

I feel like that is the problem with the community right now. We have so much hatred but very little genuine love for anything anymore. Where is that child like sense of wonder that we can roam around and exist in fully fleshed out 3D worlds? If gaming doesn’t give you that, then really what is the point of playing? There are still moments in each and every game I play where I am wrapped up in awe of some moment that just happened that I was not expecting. It might be something cool over the horizon or it might be some interesting turn of a phrase. I play these games and I write about them because I love them… not because I hate them. Even when something frustrates me to the point of spawning a rant, like I have done so many times about World of Warcraft… it comes from a place of disappointment for not being as good as it could be.

I love the games industry for all of its flaws, and I love all the ways it manages to keep me enthralled and entertained and waiting for the next thing to happen. From the moment I first got a controller in my hand this has been my story, and my “thing”. While sometimes it is pen and paper or miniatures or even card games… I am in love with games at the root of my being. So when I see someone take a crap on something and exclaim that it doesn’t deserve to exist… it depresses me that we have come to a point where that is an accepted stance. All ideas even if you do not like them, deserve their moment in the sun. Yeah I realize this top of today’s post is the equivalent of me responding with a “Carebear Stare” to a rather targeted attack… but fuck it, that’s how I roll.

Ninja Grouping

Last night I really did not do a lot of gaming, which is in part why I am bereft of content this morning to talk about. Over the last few days I have felt pretty crappy, so I am taking the initiative to try and improve things a bit. Namely I am going to try going cold turkey on energy drinks… because while they help wake my sleepy butt up… they also tend to cause me to crash pretty damned hard later. I had gotten to the point where I was starting to drink four or so a day… and that is a bit too much. So last night I went to bed around 8:30 and crashed after a few minutes of playing bravely default. Thankfully I was able to sleep all night long, but partially that was nyquil assisted. The last two nights I have woken up at 4:30 am and 3:30 am… so I was running on a serious sleep deficit.

What little I did play last night was Diablo 3. One of the aspects of the game that I absolutely adore is just how easy and seamless it is to group up with your friends. While the above image is old… because I didn’t think to take any new ones… my friend Rae ninja grouped with me while I was working on the beginning of Act 3. We did about five levels in a really short period of time and had I stuck around any longer I would have suggested popping out and bumping up the difficulty to expert. Hard really is the new normal, and none of us play the game on anything lower than that now even solo. When you add in additional people, it feels like the scaling just isn’t quite enough to compensate for the new gear fountain so we end up bumping the difficulty up a ways.

Rae managed to pull a couple of legendaries during our time grouping, but after getting three in a row last night I think the loot gods were frowning on me. For the most part I got no upgrades, but I am wearing a really nice green suit of crafted gear, so it might be a long while before I upgrade out of Aughild’s Victory. At the close of the night I was just a stones throw away from 50, which means I should be able to push through to 60 on my next big play session. I am really surprised at just how much crusader specific gear I have been getting. I even managed to get a crusader only legendary flail the other night. My only worry is that the Reaper of Souls launch is pretty much happening at the same time the head start for Elder Scrolls is, so I am not sure how much time I will really devote to leveling a crusader until I have hit a lull in ESO.

Plea for Larger Battle.net Friend List

For the love of god… can we please get a significantly larger friends list for battle.net? At this point I am actively or at least semi-actively playing three different blizzard titles. I have friends scattered between them all, some of them playing multiples, some of them playing only one. I am the guild leader of a wow guild with over 900 characters, and have a big twitter/social media community that I want to be able to play with and communicate with while in game. The current size of I believe 200… is just too damned small. It has become a weekly thing to try and prune out people that I have not played with in awhile to be able to accept friend invites from new people. I hate doing this… this goes against every instinct in me to “delete” people that I care about.

At this point we have had multiple upgrades to the battle.net infrastructure… so can we please get a significant increase in the number of people we add? Bumping it up to 1000 seems like a safe place to be, even 500 would be significantly better than where we are currently. I am sure someone is going to post and ask me if I really need that many people… yes… yes I do. Sure I might not talk to each and every person every day, but I am constantly pinging someone I have not talked to for awhile and we end up spending the evening catching up. Gaming for me is a social thing, and anything that helps me in that mission is a good idea. One of my favorite features of Rift is the fact that I can take my entire twitter feed with me. So please Battle.net do something to help out the people for whom 200 is just too small.

Raining With Friends

March 4, 2014March 4, 2014 by Belghast

Good Morning 4 am

At this point it is actually 5 am, but who is counting? My body decided it had enough sleep at roughly 4:40. I had planned on getting up at 5 anyways to get up and around early so I would have to deal with less traffic on the drive in. The greater Tulsa area is still very much under a blanket of ice and snow, and we really did not manage to get too much melt yesterday. I am hoping that once I get out of my immediate neighborhood that the roads will be clear, otherwise this is going to be an extremely frustrating trip into work. I wanted to give myself as much time as I could to get in, before the madhouse that is winter driving starts. As a result this mornings blog post is likely going to be somewhat abbreviated.

Raining With Friends

When I started down the road with Risk of Rain last Sunday, my feelings about the game have evolved into something much more nuanced. The friend that originally suggested that I play the game, had told me for some time that it was a much different experience multiplayer. Once again Ashgar was not wrong. We planned on meeting up last night and getting in on some epic tiny pixel multiplayer action. Firstly with two people and attempting to follow each other around somewhat, the various encounters become easier. There are many types of mobs that you can burn down well before it actually reaches you. Additionally when you get power-ups you can filter them towards the person who can most benefit from each type.

One of the things the game does that is pretty cool is show you an indicator of where your friend is at all times. So if they are up and to the left of you, you see their character moving along the very top left edge of the screen. We got split up often, but having this indicator allowed me to find my way back to Ashgar. I think on our first playing, with me as the default character we managed to get three worlds in before destructing horribly. On the second play through I changed things up to one of the characters I had just unlocked… the Enforcer. At face value he seems like I character I would like, with his shotgun and its pushback ability. However playing as him felt extremely sluggish, and once a mob managed to get right up on me… there was really no way to get out of there. Poor Ashgar carried me through at least two levels where I died and he finished up the map without me.

Finally on play three I think I found “my” character. The bandit has a super long rifle shot with a small amount of pushback, a sniper rifle shot, a dynamite throw and the ability to fire a smoke bomb and go invulnerable for a short period of time… just long enough to get the hell out of a bad fight. During this play through we each focused on our strengths, with me building everything ranged combat and Ash building everything melee combat. We managed to get through to world five, which involves staying alive for 40 minutes as everything tries to destroy you. At this point I had an absolutely insane drone army of 5 machine gun drones and a flamethrower drone. Stuff attacking us would just disintegrate as it got near. With 60 seconds to go… something catastrophic happened.

There seemed to be a hiccup in Cox communications the local cable provider, because at exactly the same time I disconnected from the Risk of Rain co-op session and Rae disconnected from Diablo 3. I think the game was just pissed at me, because Ash and I had managed to accumulate enough power-ups during that play through that we would have had the 40 minute timer without any issue at all. I think that is what makes this game so enjoyable, the absolute silly number of power-ups you can get. In a way it reminds me of R-Type or Gradius…. without a cap on the total number of abilities you can get. So towards the end I had 6 drones, the ability to fire anime sidewinder missles, the ability to proc mortar fire, as well as the occasional grenade. On top of all of this every shot slowed the enemies, I had insanely boosted crit damage… and a short term usage jet pack. I can now say without a doubt, that I love this game.

Whirlwind of Doom

In addition to all the Risk of Rain, I am still playing a silly amount of Diablo 3. It is funny how one patch can completely change my perspective on the game. Previously there were things I liked about it, but it felt extremely tedious to level through… knowing there was not much of a chance of getting something truly nice. However I think the change for me goes deeper than that. I love having a Clan. I love seeing across /clan when someone gets something cool, and the obligatory chorus of gratz when someone gets a really interesting legendary drop. I also love not feeling completely alone in the game. Granted right now I am mostly playing solo to catch up my Barbarian, but I like feeling that while I am doing my own thing… I am not completely alone in doing it. This is the problem I tend to have with most single player games… I just don’t feel connected to anyone else while experiencing them.

As of last night I have managed to catch my Barbarian up to level 45, and have grown into the really nice axe my monk used for awhile that summons the ghostly protector. At this point I am still using cleave as my main attack, but as of last night I switched it up a bit from a rend that heals, to the whirlwind that sucks mobs in. So far I am really liking the change as it lets me set mobs up for my freezequake attack. As of last night I was up to the realm of shadows step in the Zultan Kulle quest chain. We have decided that “Hard” is the new “Normal” mode since pretty much none of us play anything less than that when we are soloing. Normal just seems too easy now, and the xp and drops seem much better on Hard. Even at that, Hard is not all that Hard… in that I have to be not paying attention at all to actually die.

Granted I have done than more than a few times, but with my paladin healbot I can pretty much run around doing bad things. Right now through the release of Reaver of Souls, there is a “community event” going on that buffs experience gained by 50%. So my hope is to soak up as much of this goodness as I can. Once I finish pushing my Barbarian to 60 I plan on shifting back to the monk for a bit and working on paragon levels. We have quite a few people playing right now, so it is pretty easy to get a torment game going. I am not sure how amped I am with the key farming madness, but right now my key priority is getting the last two items to make a Whimsyshire staff. I want to go kill rainbows and ponies… for science. I am sad that I was not on mumble when Warenwolf took Rae to Whimsy for the first time. I am not sure if she recoiled in horror, from having to kill her beloved ponies… or if she squealed in glee. Diablo 3 seems to do the same thing League of Legends does… bring out her murderous side.

Snow Day Project

The very last cool thing I did yesterday while snowed in, was take a moment to organize my video game screenshots. For most people this is not a big deal, but since my blog very much relies on access to decent screenshots… it is slightly more important. For some time I had standardized on using a “GameShots” directory and using Fraps to take them so that everything dumped into one directory per machine. The problem is that each directory was getting unwieldy quickly. So as I tried to look a picture up, it would take forever for livewriter to list the newest files. What I opted for is a directory on my 4 terabyte network attached storage, with sub directories for each game. After setting up that structure I proceeded to sift through three different machines worth of screenshot directories and file them away in the right places.

That in itself would have been a huge positive, but I decided to go one step further. I installed Picasa on my secondary machine and am now synchronizing each of these game directories with google plus photos. Now if I am away from my machine, I still have access to my screenshots if I feel like I need to cobble together a quick post on something. My hope is this will make blogging from the lake this summer a bit easier, as there is no way I could have access to my entire archive of screenshots remotely otherwise. So far it seems to be working well, the only negative is that each time I add a new game directory I have to manually log into the machine running Picasa and configure it to sync. The next project will likely to to merge in a bunch of the screenshot directories I already have on google plus into the newly created ones.

Micro Voxel Welding

March 1, 2014 by Belghast

Big Damned Beta Weekend

This weekend they seem to have completely opened the floodgates and then some as far as Elder Scrolls Online testing goes. It seems like every person that signed up for beta before a certain point, got their invite this weekend. In addition to that, pretty much everyone who has ever tested got a buddy key. So essentially if you wanted to test the game, you should have gotten your chance this weekend. Admittedly I was more than a bit disappointed to see we were testing on an old version of the client that did not include the changed introduction. In fact it seems like everyone in the test was expecting to see the new and shiny progression. However I love Stros and Betnihk so I am more than happy to play through them again.

I had all these plans of trying to play a caster, but when it came down to rolling one… I just could not bring myself to play one. Instead I am playing “ole reliable” the build I have enjoyed the most up to this point. Dragonknight + Sword and Board and honestly each time I roll one, I perfect my build order a little bit for the next time. You would think I would get bored of playing the same basic character over and over, but instead it just makes me like it all the more. Essentially I have arrived at a point where the very first ability I take is Puncture aka the taunt/armor debuff. Essentially the first ability you place on your bar, means it is also going to be the first skill line you will have available for morphing later on. Essentially my goal in doing this is to get to Ransack the morph of Puncture, which adds a new ability that increases my armor for 12 seconds every time I use it. This makes the ability really good for survival and essentially my opening becomes a combo of Fiery Grip, Ransack… then mostly basic attacks to burn it down the rest of the way.

I just like the feel of playing this specific build, it feels very much like I want a tank to feel. I decided this weekend to cast aside my traditional human builds and go with a proud Orsimer. Normally I rely on swords, but I decided to start crafting him maces… because smashing things seems more fitting an orc…. also I don’t like the orc racial “giant machete” sword graphic. The guild is absolutely insane right now, when I logged in earlier to take a screenshot of my orc, we had 25 members and there are at least five more that have not accepted guild invites yet. Doing pretty great for a beta guild. If you are playing the game add @Belghast to your friends list, and pending we actually know each other… and you are okay with the Three Tenets… I will get you into the guild.

Level 60 Monk Get

I have to say my monk looks pretty badass. I know eventually I will upgrade out of that sword, but once we get the ability to transmog with the expansion, I can totally see dual wielding that graphic. Before the ESO beta weekend madness started, I managed with the help of Warenwolf to push the monk to 60. Really I am happy just knowing I have a character at max level before the expansion, but I can see playing it quite a bit more trying to get paragon levels. Running around in our impromptu groups has really increased my enjoyment of the game… especially now that we are getting some decent loot. It is funny how loot factors into my enjoyment so much, and in many ways the complete and total lack of meaningful loot is what killed my enjoyment of FFXIV once the questing was done.

We tried an experiment that didn’t really work yesterday as well. While I was pushing my way to 60, we had a friend join us in level 60 content with his level 10 character. We thought surely the catch up experience would be amazing, allowing him to fly through the levels. Problem is… he was not alive long enough to really catch the benefit of the xp windfall. Every mob seemed to make a beeline for him, and one-shot poor Banzai. So after getting him three for four levels this way, we opted to switch to our own characters in the teens and play for real. I had not really played my Barbarian much, but playing him I could not think about playing Olaf from League of Legends. At one point I picked up a legendary leaf blade… to which we dubbed him “Growlaf” the plant defender.

Complete and total rabbit trail here… but we started talking about how amazing it would be to have a game like Diablo 3, that instead used the champions we have grown to love from League of Legends. For awhile my friend has talked about how bad he wanted a PVE game set in the League universe… and really this seems like the ideal fit. They really would not have to change the champions that much to make them work in a Diablo setting. Additionally I have already noticed, that post League we all kinda play Diablo like we are laning in League. We move like League players move, especially when we are kiting a bad guy away to try and separate it from the pack. While I enjoy league from time to time, it is really the character design that I like, and not the game itself. If they gave me those awesome characters in a setting like Diablo that I do actually enjoy… I would probably waste innumerable hours playing it.

Micro Voxel Welding

Watch live video from EQNLandmark on TwitchTV

Hopefully this embeds just fine. I wanted to share this because I thought it was really cool. In last Wednesday’s livestream Dave Georgeson showed off a really cool “glitch in the matrix” of sorts that players have figured out. One of the interesting characteristics of the voxel engine that Everquest Next Landmark uses is that it tries to buffer between differences in two objects and naturally fill in the gaps. This can be something really cool or something really frustrating depending on how you use it. Out in the wild, players have been using this to stretch the boundaries of the engine and create something that has been dubbed the “micro voxel” or as Dave calls it in the livestream “pips”.

The idea is to take a single square voxel of the smallest available size and reduce it using the square smooth tool to get a smaller base size to build with. Having a tiny square is not that cool, but what is cool is the behavior you get in the engine when you place two of these beside each other. The engine draws the gap between creating a thin bar. This can then be used to craft really interesting things. In the video Dave Georgeson shows off a steampunky claim that he has created making metal ladders and metal grating in all sorts of shapes. Where I find this extremely cool is what this means for player crafted furniture. In the video he makes a few book cases and desk that looks far nicer than anything I have been able to craft so far.

It does seem like this takes a lot of trial and error… and copious amounts of patience. However at some point I want to get in and start trying to make furniture for my keep. The other really cool thing mentioned is that we will be getting the ability to add on to our claim in the next patch. So at this point I am trying to figure out which direction I want to grow things. I like building large structures, so I was already to a point where I was feeling extremely boxed in. I could very easily grow my existing property out to four total claims. This might be the kick I need to get back in and do more crafting. I am currently hung on a point where I need to farm just truly silly amounts of burled wood to complete all the things I want to complete.

Everything You Loved, Just Better

February 27, 2014 by Belghast

The Beauty of a Patch

This past Tuesday we finally got the ever amazing patch 2.0.1 in Diablo 3 bringing us a slew of promised Reaper of Souls changes. The first of these was something that I had yearned for since release… a decent social system with the ability to form guilds. While they call them clans, we have the basic structure now to build House Stalwart inside of Diablo 3 as well. This was one of the first things we did Tuesday after the servers came back up, and now many of us proudly sport the <HS> beside our names. It is funny how much more enjoyable the game is for me to see happy green spam from my guildies as they get cool stuff out in the world. That second it takes to say the obligatory gratz changes the feeling of the game entirely for me.

Additionally there is now a functionality called Communities, which are in a sense a big chat channel. It functions in many of the same ways as a guild, in that you can see who is online that is a member of the community for easier grouping. My only real complaint here is that you have to manually join the community chat each time you log in. I am really hoping they fix this so that you can toggle certain communities on. Tuesday night we also created the Alliance of Awesome community, and it is now out there open for the public to join. We have a few people in it, and last night I noticed that Scopique created a Combat Wombat guild, since he was sporting the <CWBT> clan tag. So the functionality seems to be working well, sub clans but one big community.

Where Does He Get Those Wonderful Toys

One of the biggest changes we have seen so far is that the loot is much better. Not only do we get more usable loot, with far more interesting statistics, but since the patch went live we are seeing more “legendaries”. Last night I found what has to be the coolest one yet. The Puzzle Ring, when equipped summons a treasure goblin pet that follows you around. As you kill things he runs over and “eats” any white quality items that happen to drop. Upon eating the thirteenth item in this fashion he drops something good on the ground. I only had this actually happen twice during the play, but each time it was simply a yellow item. However as the item says there is a chance of this being a legendary. At this point I cannot see a reason why I would ever get rid of this ring. I mean even if I got something significantly better stat wise, the effect and the coolness of having my own personal treasure goblin makes up for it. The only problem is when we fight an ACTUAL treasure goblin, I maybe… sometimes… get confused and try and attack the pet instead of the real thing.

So the puzzle ring was amazing, but the cavalcade of awesome didn’t stop there. A little bit later after downing the butcher, I managed to get a legendary one-hander to drop. Now just stats alone, it was better than anything I had… but once again it is the special effect that makes it truly great. While using this weapon there is a chance to summon a ghostly Fallen Champion, and while I don’t have any stats on this… it happens a lot. It took us a bit to realize exactly what was happening, but my ghostly buddy seemed to help speed up our kills significantly. At this point I have managed to pick up better damage weapons, but I am rocking this is my offhand just for the procs… which seem to make up the gap. At some point I will pass this off to my Barbarian or Crusader, because it really is rather good.

Everything You Loved, Just Better

So last night I spent most of the night running around in either a three man or a four man group. I don’t even know what difficulty we were playing on, but I know we ratcheted up a few times from normal. Around 7 pm I was sitting at 37, and at 10:30 when we stopped playing I had just dinged 50. The experience gain for grouping has significantly improved, and if we do another night of this I have no doubt that I will get my first Diablo 3 character to the present level cap. A few months ago… I was deeply uncertain if this would happen before the expansion actually landed. Everything about Diablo 3 just feels “fresher”, like the world has a shiny coat of paint… and in part this is the magic of finally getting meaningful drops. Also there is the side benefit that the crafting system finally makes a marginal amount of sense. So many things have been tweaked to make far more sense… like condensing all the flavors of heal pot into one… and making them stack to 100.

I still dislike click to move as a control scheme, but it feels as though the hours I have spent playing League of Legends has improved my dexterity at doing so. While I still die a lot to standing in the stupid…. and man we got some seriously bad combinations of stupid at the same time… there seems to be a far greater chance that I will come through it all successfully. There were a few times last night where I ended up kiting mobs around when I was by myself, and were not for the little bit of experience I have laning in LoL… I never would have survived. Granted I am still pretty freaking horrible at laning, but it has made me a much better Diablo player just in the bit I have done. Hopefully tonight we can push our little team of characters to 60 and start gaining some Paragon levels.

Belghast the Altar Boy

I was raised Catholic in a very protestant area of the world, and this was an area for confusion during most of my childhood. I still remember one day in elementary school one of the southern Baptist children coming up to me and asking me “why I don’t believe in god”. Idiocy like that aside, I have never been very “religious” and at this point I am not a practicing anything. I can’t even attest to having something that you could quantify as a formal doctrine of beliefs… I mostly just spend my time trying to be a good person… and winging it. However as any good catholic should be… I was an Altar Boy. No this is not the beginning of a priest sex abuse tale, because really my priest was one of the coolest people I have ever known. He would probably be classified as a heretic, but he was the first person that told me it was okay to question my beliefs.

The funny thing about being an Altar Boy is that forever will it color the way you feel about the heart of the Catholic church… the Mass. Before they started with the incense crap recently, forcing to simply not attend Christmas Eve Mass… I did so every year to appease my mother… who refuses to believe that I am not a “good little catholic boy”. Even to this day, I can hear certain phrases in the Mass, and immediately feel the instinct to do something… like walk over to pick up this thing, or move to this area of the altar. As an Altar Boy you learn this oddly choreographed dance to prove the priest whatever he needs before he actually needs it. I use the term “Altar Boy” but in truth our parish was pretty progressive and had plenty of “Altar Girls” as well. The priest claimed that we simply didn’t have enough people, but in truth I think he just enjoyed shaking things up a bit.

I really don’t miss much about being a practicing Catholic. We were a satellite parish attached to a significantly larger one, and as such we shared the same priest. So each Sunday morning at 7 am he would come to our church, perform mass and then return to do the several masses there as well throughout the day. Seven in the morning seemed like the ass crack of dawn to me as a kid, and while I write each morning at 6 am… it doesn’t mean I am actually fully verbal until about 9. I do however miss the priest, he has long since retired but he really was a deeply interesting man. Once upon a time in another life he was a fairly successful commercial artist, working for an advertising agency. For reasons I never asked him, he decided to give that life up and enter the priesthood. I always got the impression there was quite a bit of sex, drugs and rock and roll… and he just tired of the life and wanted something more meaningful. So much of my outlook on life comes from this man being the first person who told me that religion was a deeply personal thing, and it was natural and in fact encouraged for me to question things and figure out my own path.